Posted
by
Unknown Lamer
on Tuesday April 03, 2012 @02:35PM
from the trolls-with-advanced-technology dept.

After nine
months of effort, Nokia's Qt Lab has announced the availability of
the alpha
release of Qt 5. Goals achieved for this release include a new platform
abstraction layer, a re-architected graphics stack, and the
inclusion of Qt Quick as a first-class citizen (hitting version 2.0, and using Google's V8 Javascript engine to boot). Quoting Lars Knoll:
"'Qt 5 should be the foundation for a new way of developing
applications. While offering all of the power of native Qt using C++,
the focus should shift to a model, where C++ is mainly used to
implement modular backend functionality for Qt Quick.' I can say that
we came a good way closer to this vision with Qt 5.0. The model is
working nicely on the embedded side of Qt where UIs are full
screen. On the desktop, we have laid most of the foundations required
for this model, but it’ll take us until 5.1 or 5.2 to really take this
into use."
Nokia has posted the the source and detailed release
notes on the Qt wiki.

Why is everyone heading to this "everything is a web app" model? A scripting languages embedded into an app is find but it should be used for quick mods and customization instead of core functionality, and should be layered on top of the application and not the base that the application is built from.

You don't have a clue what you're talking about. QML greatly simplifies 90% of the UI development while making it significantly easier to target multiple devices with the same UI, regardless of screen size or aspect ratio. A desktop-focused, c++-based UI model is hardly the better way to do it.

Of course if you've never worked with a document description language like Tex, you probably won't grasp the significance of that statement.

I like the C++ object model Qt uses. It reminds me of the "Elements" environment from the company formerly known as Neuron Data. I was surprised to hear they're still around, and there are still production applications written with it that need maintenance and updates because they're not ready to be retired yet.

But Qt is brought up to date with modern C++ features like template programming; I don't know if Elements has been similarly reworked. GTK is a pretty nice layer as well, but it's a portable graphics layer rather than a graphics abstraction like Qt or Elements. You can write custom widgets in Qt or Elements and have them work on multiple platforms, sort of like Java/Swing for C++. I'm not so sure about how to do so with GTK.

It was refreshing to see them being honest that it's not really going to be ready for production use until 5.2 or thereabouts.

Describing UI in markup is plainly more convenient than writing verbose code to construct widget trees. And declarative property bindings are much more concise than the usual OO way to plumb together model and views.

Basically, it lets you focus on writing code where it's the best way to solve a problem - in your model - and use a more convenient DSL (in the case of Qt Quick, QML for markup and JS for bindings) for view-related stuff and plumbing between the two.